The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

On the face of it, Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending, is not only a very short novel, it is also a very simple one. But then one might say that Barnes whole point in the novel is that no part of so-called history is to be taken on its face. Every life is more complicated than it seems, and memory a flimsy and unreliable guide even to our own lives, let alone the lives of those around us.

The story begins as one of three boys together at a boarding school: Tony, Colin, and Alex, who are then joined by a fourth, Adrian Finn. It is Tony who tells the story, but it Adrian who awakens the other three, and in a sense catapults them into their lives. 

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first indiscernible. 

Adrian is the brightest of the boys, and also the most serious. While the original three seem simply to use their cleverness to get by, Adrian is already deeply engaged. One of their teachers raises a question central to the novel, “What is history?” Adrian’s response seems at first as flippant as the offhand answers of the others, but turns out to be anything but flippant.

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” 

The first half of this short book takes the boys through boarding school, and the reader gets a perceptive look at the sexual insecurities of teenage boys who are anxious to meet girls, but unsure about what they expect or even want from them. Although the four boys pledge to remain close forever, in fact as they drift into their post-boarding school lives, different schools, different professions, they also drift from one another. Tony, the narrator, has a brief and perplexing relationship with a girl, Veronica, who then becomes involved with Adrian. Although Tony exited the relationship before Adrian hooks up with Veronica, he nevertheless manages to feel betrayed by both, with mild reservations about whether his reading is a just one. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.”

Abruptly, surprisingly, the reader is informed that Adrian, the thinker, the serious one, commits suicide at twenty-two, having left an enigmatic, though existentially lucid note of explanation. Book One concludes with Tony grown up, married and divorced, his child also grown, and now looking back on his life as complete and, if not sensational, nevertheless satisfactory. So why a book Two at all? The slice of life novel seems complete, well written, entertaining if not extraordinary. But of course it is Book Two that re-raises all the questions about history, and shows graphically just where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacy of documentation. 

Although I have no intention of giving away the mysteries introduced in Book Two, it is this second looking back that makes this a profound novel. Tony, in his retirement, continues to read history, though he finds himself more interested in the histories of Greece and Rome than with those of his own time. 

Perhaps I just feel safe with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

A letter, along with a relatively small amount of money bequeathed him from an unlikely source, causes Tony to look again at his own life and to see how that lovely word, ‘deliquescent’ applies to his history. Indeed, the picture he has, the story he has told himself over and over until it has become solid and clear, begins to dissolve, to become liquid. Everything begins to shift; all that was in focus blurs. Nothing is as it had seemed. Not simply in Tony’s life, but for all of us who step back to take another look. 

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

While Book Two is what transforms this book from simply a well-told slice-of-life story into a philosophically profound piece, when I finished the book, I still found myself puzzled by all the attention it has received. Is this really a Booker Prize sort of novel? But after letting it percolate for a bit, I picked it up again, looking back on it a second time, much as Tony looks again at his own life, and this time I was struck with its depth. I now think it is much more than a well told story; I think you will too.

Hungry For The World by Kim Barnes

By the time I was thirteen…I would have come to understand that it was Eve who desired the fruit and its store of hidden knowledge, Eve who had damned us all from the Garden. Years away from that child sleeping in her mother’s arms, I would enter into my young woman’s life knowing these two things: by my gender I was cursed, and my mind would destroy me.

This we learn from Kim Barnes near the very beginning of her chilling memoir, Hungry for the World. Those of us who have escaped from fundamentalist upbringings immediately recognize a kindred spirit in this often heart-wrenching account, and cheer mightily as she tears herself free of the Pentecostal church and the well-meaning but authoritarian father who see’s himself as God’s appointed caretaker of his wife and children, especially his female children.

As a woman, she must compensate for the flaw of her gender by extreme modesty. Her hair was her glory and could not be shorn. For a woman to don pants shocked the male’s superior station. Her arms must be covered, her shoulders, her knees—any part of her that might entice, intrigue, attract, cause another to sin. Silence was her virtue.

For most of her young life, Kim is a dutiful daughter. She admires her nature-loving father and wants both to please him and to be like him. But one of his exhortations to her is to use her mind, to question and think for herself, and this seems to contradict the unflagging obedience that is demanded of her. She describes herself as being “ravenous for words.”

Words were jewels to be turned and examined for every facet, every refraction of light. The only absolutes were the legalities of my faith—the rules for behavior and salvation—and my father’s authority, his word that could not be questioned.

I wonder now if my father may have foreseen that the analytical skills with which he engendered me might someday lead me away from the beliefs he himself embraced. For even as he insisted that I think for myself, he cautioned me against thinking too much. To think was to know, but the desire to know more than had been granted was blasphemy.

Believing as her church told her that she was one of the chosen few and that “God would return to gather His chosen ones home…Dancing was a sin, as were smoking, drinking, rock and roll, swimming with the opposite sex,” she endeavored to make herself pure, to conquer the hunger for life that led her to books and to impure thoughts. After an early outbreak of will and disobedience led to her being sent away, banished for a summer to the home of a preacher who would try to save her from herself, she is reborn to her faith.

I remember how I lay on the floor of my narrow room and cried, then prayed. I felt the weight that was all my sins and worries and cares press me down, then fall away. It happens just this way: one moment, the horrid drunkenness of a life not right, of a soul bloated by neglect and transgression; the next, a feeling of lightness and sharp cleansing. Simply by letting go of my will, my stubborn refusal to submit, I’d been unbound, reborn to the Kingdom of God.

But her rebirth does not last; tempted by a boy in her church to touch in forbidden ways, she soon finds that she has not only alienated her father, but has simply been delivered into the hands of another boy-man who insists that he must determine her boundaries; she learns also that men are dangerous if they become angry. The lesson comes home yet again, “Above all, I must, for the length of my woman’s life, give myself over to the direction of another.”

Although a bright student with what seems to be a promising future in college and beyond, when she refuses absolute obedience to her father, she has to leave his home shortly after graduating high school.

Up to this point in her account of her young life, I was simply enthralled, by her skill as a writer, by her courage in going her own way, thinking for herself and rejecting the absurd and narrow dictates of her church and her father. I could hardly wait to finish her memoir and to encourage others to read it. But although she manages to leave both church and father, she remains so self-absorbed in her own struggle for identity that she appears not to notice the political world around her or the ways in which her struggles are a part of much larger struggles against economic oppression, sexism, and racism. She finds men who allow her to be like them, to hunt with them, drink with them, indulge in sexual desire, but she realizes almost nothing about the larger world that the reader supposes she hungered for.

In fact, she finally falls for an older man, David, who is very much like her father in wanting her total submission to his will; and again she decides that somehow her freedom, her identity, is to be found via submission to his kinky sexual appetites.  She seems really to have learned very little from her break from religious fundamentalism. David is not only an avid hunter, he is cruel. He kills animals that he cannot eat, including an owl that he so wants to posses that he shoots it, has it stuffed, and puts it on his mantel as a show of his power. Together they shoot songbirds out of the sky; “I followed David’s lead, blowing the early monarchs and lacewings into velvet tatters. I remember being made uneasy by such casual cruelty, but I dared not protest. Just as when I’d watched John sight in the starlings and inky ravens, I knew that any emotional response on my part would compromise the place I held in the company of men.”

David wants her to submit to his will completely. If he needs her to give herself to other men (showing them the prize that belongs to him), she is to do it. She is not to question what he does when not with her, whom he sleeps with. And for almost all of the remainder of the memoir, we read of how she adjusts to the needs of the men in her life.

There is finally a hint of genuine consciousness towards the end of the book, a dawning realization that her struggle is like the struggle of others.

I lay on my bed, surrounded by my guns, my marksmanship medals, my karate certificates, library books piled high on the nightstand, at the bottom a copy of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. I did not yet know how this book would give me my first true taste of political awareness, how it would make me see my struggle in larger terms, give me membership in a common sisterhood.

She does go back to school, does become the writer who produces this memoir, but while I admire her skills as a writer, I remain skeptical of her wisdom and her understanding of political realities. For this reader, she is still the girl who wants to please her father and the cruel men in her life, even if that means taking on the very characteristics that forced her rebellion. Perhaps we will see how her escape and salvation play out in a subsequent memoir.